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Samantha Irby’s third collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You, is the perfect read for those of us entering into a new level of comfortability with ourselves during this time of social isolation. Irby’s previous essay collections, Meaty and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, take more of a memoir route, addressing the deaths of Irby’s parents and her struggles growing up in an impoverished household. In this third book, Irby focuses more on her current reality, diving into how it feels to be a 40 year-old woman living in her body, offering hilarious observations on her bodily functions and various aches and pains. She recalls what it was like to move to Hollywood for a couple of months to write for the Hulu adaptation of Shrill, for someone who is a “cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person,” and the physical terror of being a black gay woman living in the rural midwest.
While Irby often laughs at herself for engaging in juvenile toilet humor, like all the best satire, her jokes about her body address a deeply important cultural reality—the healthcare system’s inability to address the needs of women of color. (All the more relevant now.) She writes of her struggles with Crohn’s disease, and how difficult it was to finally get doctor’s to perform surgery on her to stop her dangerous menstrual cycle. She describes how medical procedures paid out-of-pocket have represented a massive financial burden for her, how much discrimination she’s faced from doctors who can’t look past her weight to the real issues. By writing so honestly about her body, Irby gives voice to many women who’ve faced similar struggles to get medical professionals to take them seriously, opening up a crucial dialogue where there was once a silence partly brought on by shame.
In an interview with HuffPost, Irby smartly addressed critics who take issue with her level of focus on race: “I recognize that everything I do is impacted by my Blackness, especially as a big Black lady struggling in the medical world with my health issues. When writing, the first things on the list are a combination of being a woman and Black, with being fat a close second. This is the lens I see my world through…what I do know about is taking a shit as a Black woman with an autoimmune deficiency. And there are always going to be times when I can’t win with people, but all I can do is keep being myself and writing what I know”. This comment speaks to the real beauty of Irby’s writing, her ability to be honest about her trials crosses the divide between the personal and the universal. Her prose is such a genuine effort toward inclusion that never has to state that its express purpose is inclusion™.
Wow, No Thank You is the perfect book for our current age. It is a sharp and insightful collection from one of our most hilarious writers, and the experience of reading feels like the best kind of self-care. Each and every essay in this collection made this reader laugh out loud, it is replete with witty observations on a wide variety of topics. This is a brilliant collection that feels like a must read for women living in the world today.
Further Reading/Viewing: Irby’s blog is chock full of her signature humor (and so are her social media platforms). And Shrill on Hulu is excellent.